Tapes offer insight into Moonda's affair

AKRON, Ohio - Donna Moonda and Damian Bradford seemed like a happy couple in August 2004, even referring to themselves as the "Double D's," a Center Township rental agent said Wednesday.

But in recorded phone calls between the two, played in federal court Wednesday, Moonda seemed more like Bradford's meal ticket - the former Center Township man pleading constantly for money, saying he was struggling with just $80 in his pocket.

"Gather up any change you can for me, because I'm really struggling out here," Bradford said to his lover on Nov. 23, 2005, and within moments asking if she could give him transportation, saying, "What, you got three cars?"

The 48-year-old Hermitage, Mercer County, woman insisted her finances were on shaky ground in the wake of the May 13, 2005, shooting death of her husband, Dr. Gulam Moonda, saying she couldn't find a job in the area.

In the third day of Donna Moonda's federal murder trial on charges she persuaded Bradford, 25, to shoot her husband to death so that the pair could share millions of dollars in inheritance money, technology stepped to the forefront.

Bradford has already confessed to killing the 69-year-old urologist along the Ohio Turnpike and agreed to testify against Donna Moonda.

Prosecutors Wednesday afternoon began laying out perhaps one of their strongest pieces of evidence against Moonda, saying that she and Bradford left a trail of electronic breadcrumbs the day of the slaying.

An Ohio State Highway patrol trooper testified that at 4:14 p.m. May 13, 2005, Moonda sent a text message to Bradford that read, "I'm getting something to drink b4 I go. I luv u."

Little more than 15 minutes later, prosecutors said, Donna Moonda, her husband and her mother, Dorothy Smouse, set out from Mercer County for Toledo, Ohio, with Bradford following behind, phone records showed.

But it was the taped conversations between Moonda and Bradford that raised courtroom eyebrows Wednesday morning.

One of those conversations was taped on June 30, 2005, as Bradford was in the Lawrence County Jail on unrelated drug charges, and prosecutors said Bradford and Moonda were aware that they were being taped.

But they didn't know that investigators had tapped Moonda's cell and home phone in late November 2005, and they played conversations captured on Nov. 23, 2005, the day after Bradford was released from jail on the drug charges, and Nov. 28, 2005.

In them, Moonda and Bradford acknowledged that others around them, including their respective probation officers, said it would be a bad idea, while suspicions swirled around them, that they saw each other or had any contact. The pair met in drug rehabilitation in Center Township after Moonda, a former nurse anesthetist, was convicted of stealing drugs from her hospital workplace.

But they ignored that advice in November, talking about meeting at the Shenango Valley Mall in Hermitage so that Bradford could go to Moonda's house and spend time with her.

Just once, Moonda seemed to profess her innocence of any involvement in her husband's killing, saying, "If they would just catch who did this. It really pisses me off that they are going down the wrong track."

Both realized they were under investigators' microscopes. At one point, Bradford warned Moonda about who she talked to and what she said, instructing her, "You have to be careful. They'll try to use everything."

In his opening statements Monday, Moonda's defense attorney, Roger Synenberg, said that not only did Bradford, who has already confessed to killing Gulam Moonda, act alone in the slaying, but that Bradford showed Moonda affection so that she would show him the money.

Those conversations seemed to back up at least a portion of that defense theory, with Bradford asking repeatedly if Moonda could supply him with cash and a vehicle.

The day after he was released from jail, Bradford asked Moonda for money, saying that with a car Moonda had bought for him being repossessed, and no place to live, he had only the clothes on his back.

"I don't know what I'm going to do right now. I'm all (messed) up," Bradford said.

Moonda sympathized but said that she was being chased by bill collectors. When Bradford said that her giving him money would "help me out a little bit," she replied, "Right now, I don't have any money."

In other court testimony:

Under questioning by Synenberg, Ohio State Highway Patrol Sgt. Dennis Goodhart confirmed Synenberg's assertion that Bradford said it was planned that if Donna Moonda was questioned about her husband's slaying, she was to give "the exact opposite" description of him, in an apparent attempt to throw off investigators.

Goodhart said Bradford revealed that he and Moonda had plotted the doctor's slaying for nearly six months before it happened.

Goodhart said Bradford repeatedly lied to investigators that he had nothing to do with the shooting, until several days before he was scheduled to stand trial on federal murder charges in July 2006 instead cutting a plea agreement.

Prosecutors showed paperwork in which Moonda bought a vehicle for Bradford, putting down $3,000 and making the monthly payments, and also helped him rent an apartment in the Colonial Oaks apartment complex in Center Township in 2004.

Each time, investigators said, Moonda did so while keeping Bradford's name off the paperwork, and she used her maiden name, Smouse.

Beaver County resident Gregory Barger, 21, said he gave Bradford the gun believed to have been used in the shooting, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol with the word "Witness" on it, around Christmas 2004.

Barger said he "didn't want the gun anymore," and said he owed Bradford money for marijuana.

Testimony is scheduled to continue today.

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